


Five Musical Questions

by karaokegal



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Angst, Come As You're Not 2006, Come As You're Not Challenge, M/M, Rare Pairings, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-13
Updated: 2012-09-13
Packaged: 2017-11-14 04:31:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/511338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karaokegal/pseuds/karaokegal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Musical Questions

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Come As You're Not 2006. 
> 
> Why It's a Costume: I’m a H/W shipper and I’m writing Wilson/Foreman. I’m attempting the present tense, nonlinear, snap-shot, poetic style and proving quite effectively why I should never do any of those things again. 
> 
> (Eventually I did all or most of those things again, but this was 2006 and it was all very new.)

_Who are you?_

**Everybody knows, or thinks they know, about House and Wilson who flaunt their whatever it is for all the world to see. Cameron’s been wearing her love for House as an accessory so long it’s become part of her name, and either she can’t see the pity or she’s adopted it instead of a stray kitten. Chase and Cameron’s one-night stand has already passed into hospital lore. Nurses and orderlies claim to know details of dialogue and anatomy possible only if the event were available for viewing on Youtube. Rumors are the coin of the realm for bored interns. They trade them like baseball cards. “I’ll give you my House and Cuddy for your House and Chase if you throw in Chase and the entire nursing staff in alphabetical order.**

**No one would ever suspect Foreman and Wilson in a million years, and that’s just how Foreman likes it.**

James Evan Wilson.   
Dr. Wilson.  
James.  
Jimmy   
Jack and Hannah’s son.  
David and Nathan’s baby brother.  
Jeanne and Jane and (eventually) Julie’s ex-husband, a/k/a that sonofabitch who can’t keep it in his pants for ten minutes. House’s jokes about not having to change the monograms on his towels were old the day Jeanne left. Now they’re just rancid.

The masks are choking him. He fucks Foreman to lose himself. No identity, just flesh. He comes back from orgasm unable to remember his name, hoping Foreman won’t bother to remind him. 

_What’s Going On?_

House would be crude, if he knew. Shagging, shtupping, boning, balling. Along with some extra nastiness regarding the racial thing. “Once you go black…” Wilson would love to tell him that he’s gone and come back many times. 

If Julie knew, she’d call it an affair. Cry. Call the lawyers. Ask How? and Why?, but we’re not up to those questions yet. 

 

**It doesn’t have to be anything, you know? Just fun. Just Wilson’s cock sliding into his ass like it was always meant to be there. You don’t fall in love with a guy like Wilson. Foreman doesn’t fall in love with guys, period. He doesn’t really fall in love with anybody.**

**And no, he’s not a “schmuck” as House would say. He knows that this “mishegas with House” as Wilson sometimes calls it, has been going on before Foreman came to PPTH and will go on long after.**

**He almost dies and desperately needs to believe that nothing has changed, that he doesn’t have moments months later where he still feels scared and empty. He gets up for work wondering if it matters any more.**

Wilson knows what’s happening. Wants to help. Can't. He has other patients who came first and always will. 

 

_When?_

“How Long Has This Been Going On”   
By George and Ira Gershwin. Sung by Billie Holiday.

_I could cry salty tears. Where have I been all these years. Little wow, tell me now. How long has this been going on?”_

 

**(He only plays Billie right after Wilson leaves.)**

**Not after the illness. Not some bullshit attempt to “affirm life” by getting it on with the hottest white man he knows. There’d be Chase for that, if he wasn’t such a boy, and Foreman doesn’t fancy himself a pedophile.**

**How about when you asked Wilson for help consolidating your takeover of the diagnostics department?**

**That was a joke, man.**

**Wilson actually said “Hail Foreman” while fucking him that night and made him laugh so hard they nearly couldn’t finish.**

**“E tu Brute?” He’d commented when Wilson finally came.**

 

“How Long (Has This Been Going On)”  
By Ace  
A different musical question. No Gershwin. No Billie Holiday. Just bad 70’s pop and Wilson’s fear that someday he’ll walk in House’s apartment and hear it blaring through the speakers out of the iPod.

_How long has this been goin' on ?  
How long has this been goin' on ?_

_Well your friends with their fancy persuasions_  
Can't admit that it's part of the scene  
But I can't help but have my suspicions  
'Cause I ain't quite as dumb as I seem 

_And you said you were never intendin'_  
To break up our secret this way  
But there ain't any use in pretendin'  
It could happen to us any day 

 

If it happened, Wilson would tell House about the tension that had been building up between him and Foreman while they argued about treating the homeless woman. He might even mention the jaw dropping effect of seeing Foreman’s abdominals, thrown into relief by harsh lighting hitting dark skin, when he had to give him the rabies shots. 

There was a good chance House would believe it, or want to. Heat of the moment. Thin line between love and hate. And all that jazz. 

Better than telling House he’d run into a young neurologist at a conference in LA. Eric Foreman had already applied for a fellowship with Dr. House and no, it wasn’t quite a co-incidence that he just happened to attend a panel moderated by House’s one and only confidante. 

Wilson wants to believe that the subsequent night in his hotel room was all his idea. He was curious and horny in spite of things being good with Julie and better with House. 

“House isn’t interested in normal qualifications.” 

“How about my pretty face?”

“He’s already got one of those in the department.” 

“My hot ass?”

“It’ll take more than that. What makes you more interesting than any other neurologist? Did you ever run away and join the circus? Got an uncle who’s a bigamist? Can you play the kazoo? You’re not going to get this job on your SATs.”

Eric looked away from Wilson while he was getting dressed and told him about his juvenile arrest record. 

Wilson smiled knowing he’d have a fall-back position the next time House made it too difficult to love him. 

 

_Where Do Broken Hearts (and horny doctors) Go?_

**Foreman’s apartment.**

**Always.**

**No matter how often Wilson suggests alternatives. Exam room 2. Supply closet. A spare bed in the psych ward. (The lunatics will think they’re having a really good hallucination.) Labs. He sees PPTH as a sexual playground and every Motel 6 and Super 8 along the interstate as a potential pit stop.**

**“Are you crazy?”**

**Foreman can only imagine where Wilson gets these ideas and who he’s actually had in the fifth floor men’s room.**

**“You want me, you come home and do it in my bed. I don’t sneak around this place like one of your bimbos. If you’re bored, feel free to screw your wife. I’m sure she’d appreciate it.”**

**She doesn’t. She’s been cheating and Wilson ends up on House’s couch. He says it’s the couch, this time. Foreman has a couch too, but it’s not his place to offer and Wilson couldn’t have accepted anyway.**

_Why Can’t You Behave?_

Because he can’t help it. Cheated on his first girlfriend (age 9) by giving a valentine to her best friend.. Since then he’s learned to be more discreet and has never made a move on any of his wives’ best friends. Anything else is fair game.

Because he loves House. Has for years. Before the infarction, before Stacy, before Julie, before they ever got drunk enough to fall into bed and House sobered up first and they’ve been playing this sick game ever since. He won’t walk away from his marriages until they walk away from him and he can’t walk away from House until House pushes him out the door with one honest brutality too many. 

Every time House hurts him, every time he can't live with Julie’s doe eyes, every time he takes a nurse to a place where the clerk pretends not to know him, there’s always Foreman shaking his head, knitting his eye brows together in amusement and still letting him in the door and into him shortly afterwards.

Maybe just because he likes being the top for a change and Foreman really is an incredible piece of ass. 

_When Did You Stop Loving Me._

**When Foreman’s fellowship ends. He accepts a job at Cedars-Sinai that will put him on the fast track to running the Neurology Department. “Boy Wonder Neurologist” doesn’t have quite the same ring, but there’s never been anything boyish about Eric Foreman, even when he was a child.**

**He watches Wilson watch him pack. There’s so much to say and no way to say it. Maybe they’ll see each other at a conference and Foreman will hope he doesn’t catch Wilson in the act of finding his replacement.**

**There’s an awkward hug and a final lingering kiss as the cab waits and the driver worries about traffic on the way to Newark. Foreman leaves with a last taste of Wilson on his lips, not knowing if he needs to thank Wilson or apologize or both.**

 

It ends when…

House, who was never supposed to know, gives him an ultimatum, using the coarsest words possible and referencing yet another Rolling Stones song. Wilson tells Foreman while fucking him for the last time. It’s even better than the first time, and Wilson hadn’t thought that was possible.

Julie, who is not an idiot, despite what House wants to believe and Wilson needs to believe, pours his coffee in their breakfast nook one morning and calmly asks if House knows he’s cheating on them both. Her sympathetic smile is the most chilling thing he’s ever seen. 

He’s become addicted to the texture of Foreman’s skin , the distinct taste of his sweat and the complex structure of vertebrae as he works his way down Foreman’s back on the way to his final goal and the oblivion he manages to find there. He’s got his job and Foreman’s back and nothing else matters. It’s almost too easy to live on the skid row of his sexual needs and he’s looking for a way out even before the shooting. Afterwards, it’s easy to quit, the way it’s easy for a heroin addict to go cold turkey. He detoxes through House’s rehab and is shocked, shocked to find that House doesn’t want him back. Revenge is not sweet and all the classical references in the world won’t take away his guilt, but at least he’s back living the pain he remembers, not the pleasure that threatened to take over his life. 

Maybe it never ends. It’s that good and they’re that careful. 

Wilson strokes himself in his bed at night, imagining himself plunging into Foreman again and again, losing himself in his own grunts of pleasure.

Maybe it never happened at all.


End file.
